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Eclipse awarded ACM System Software Award

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has awarded Eclipse its prestigious System Software Award. The award is given to recognise "developing a software system that has had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts, in commercial acceptance, or both" and has, in the past, gone to the developers of Java, Unix, TeX, Apache, Smalltalk, RPC, the World Wide Web, and PostScript.

The award for Eclipse names many of the original Eclipse development team who are still at IBM – John Wiegand, Dave Thomson, Gregory Adams, Philippe Mulet, Julian Jones, John Duimovich, and Kevin Haaland – along with Steve Northover (now at Oracle) and Erich Gamma (now at Microsoft). Of these, only John Duimovich is still directly involved with Eclipse, but Eclipse Foundation Executive Director notes that "Eclipse remains successful, vibrant and innovative. It is truly an industry-wide platform that is relied upon in diverse areas such as enterprise development, embedded software development, mobile and modeling".

The ACM made the award because it says "Eclipse changed the way builders think about tools by defining a set of user interaction paradigms for which domain-specific variants are plugged in and customised for their tool" by creating an IDE platform designed for developers to "seamlessly integrate their own extensions, specialisations, and personalisations".